The Dream Thieves

“I wish you could be kissed, Jane,” he said. “Because I would beg just one off you. Under all this.” He flailed an arm toward the stars.

Jane, how do you feel about doing something slightly illegal and definitely distasteful?” Gansey asked.

Ronan’s second secret was Adam Parrish.

A secret is a strange thing.

There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone knows about, the sort you need at least two people for. One to keep it. One to never know. The second is a harder kind of secret: one you keep from yourself. Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words: I am afraid.

And then there is the third kind of secret, the most hidden kind. A secret no one knows about. Perhaps it was known once, but was taken to the grave. Or maybe it is a useless mystery, arcane and lonely, unfound because no one ever looked for it.

Sometimes, some rare times, a secret stays undiscovered because it is something too big for the mind to hold. It is too strange, too vast, too terrifying to contemplate.

All of us have secrets in our lives. We’re keepers or kept-from, players or played. Secrets and cockroaches — that’s what will be left at the end of it all.

The Gray Man took the gun from the passenger seat and shot his brother. Twice.

“Really,” he said, “it’s just me.”

“It’s all right,” Ronan said.

Matthew believed him; why shouldn’t he? Ronan had never lied.

But he had been dying since Ronan met him. They both had been.

Dying’s a boring side effect.

Non mortem, somni fratrem.

“It’s only you,” whispered Orphan Girl. She was holding his hand, crouched down next to him. “Why do you hate you?”

Ronan thought about it.

The albino night horror swept in, talons opening.

Ronan stood up, stretching out his arm like he would to Chainsaw.

“I don’t,” he said.

And he woke up.

In English, she added, “Many thieves. One Greywaren.”